[FridayoLeary]

It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide.

On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.

[whimsicalism]

To be a bit blunt, God isn’t real and shouldn’t really be part of the discussion here - and I disagree that a belief otherwise is ‘understandable.’

[dfee]

Thank you for your contribution to the discussion, whimsicalism.

[inglor_cz]

"It feels too much like playing god."

Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected.

IVF was once "playing god".

Heart transplants were once "playing god".

Resuscitation was once "playing god".

Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god".

Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".

[bhickey]

Denying people lifesaving medical care is, and will always be, "playing god."

[card_zero]

Then that also applies to providing it. If the solution is to provide it to everybody, you can't, so you'll have to be selective. So even creating life-saving medicine means denying it to some people. Moral dilemmas everywhere you tread, as is normal.

[xvector]

> But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual.

This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc.

Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.

[FridayoLeary]

It's not a simple debate, but you are suggesting unprecedented levels of medical intervention. It's an ethical minefield. Firstly, i'm sure this is not your intention, but you are basically suggesting we should test genetic experiments on human guinea pigs. I'm not an expert in medical ethics but i'm pretty sure it's a major no go however noble the intention (i know new treatments get tested the whole time but this is a level up from that) . You are also suggesting we should use it to solve problems as trivial as colour blindness, even without fully understanding the moral, ethical and social impacts of using gene editing in such a way.

[Barrin92]

>why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god.

This I think is in some ways the most pathetic argument of them all because it reveals a profound moral cowardice. I just saw a chart today, 1 billion children under the age of five have died since 1950, a lot of them to disease. While you're afraid to play, god's racking up quite a score.

What's so astonishing about it is that the suffering doesn't seem to matter. Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally. Every time you play god what people seem to be afraid of is not the suffering, which is omnipresent because life in its natural state is pure carnage, but not having to attach your name to it and taking responsibility. It's okay if some old guy rots away miserably because if I assist in his suicide then I might make a mistake and I had to make a choice. Rather, forward it to god or nature, or what have you. And then in addition this cowardice, thinking that conscious inaction isn't an action, gets rebranded as a humanism.

[hollerith]

>Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally.

This source estimates 1% from 1700 to 1750 in England:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014107680609901113